I was sharing an elevator yesterday with a person who was totally engrossed in her copy of Soap Opera Digest. My first thought was “Get a grip! It’s just a TV show!”
But, although I love watching football, I have said for many years that in the overall scheme of things, who wins the Super Bowl is exactly as important, no more, no less, than who’s f&*king whom on Days of Our Lives. This is not an opinion I loudly share in sports bars.
Question: Is the sports page really any different than Soap Opera Digest? Since Days of Our Lives sells soap, and the NFL sells beer, is football Beer Opera? And if there are sports bars, why arent there soap opera bars?
Although I don’t think sports are really all that important in the big picture, I do think they are more important than soap operas. For the simple reason that sports event are real, while soap operas are just TV shows. Who wins the Super Bowl does make a big difference in the real world-to the guys who played in the game, and who coached or owned the team, if to no-one else. You may watch the game on TV, but it is happening in reality, to real people. And there is no script. The Super Bowl may be some 27-year-old linebacker’s finest moment, something he tells his grandchildren about. It could determine the course of his future career-good or bad-as could any other game in any sport. But soap operas? They’ll just repeat the same plotline in 6 months or so. They are actors, reading from a script, where the results are pre-determined and no real person is ever affected.
The above is why pro wrestling is often compared with soap operas, and is not considered a “sport”. Predetermined outcomes and a performance that consists of playing to the cameras make it a show, not a contest. Might I add that all curent pro sports (football, basketball, hockey, football) pre-date the existence of television? But pro-wrestling’s first big wave of popularity (in the 1950’s) coincided with the invention of the boob tube.
As much as I despise pro wrasslin’, I’ve gotta dispute (or at least qualify) the remark above.
While pro football certainly predates TV, it seems to be the general consensus of sports writers that the watershed event of pro football’s climb to prominence was the 1958 NFL championship game, Colts/Giants, the first NFL championship to be decided in sudden-death overtime.
The critical factor? It was the first televised NFL championship game.
First of, let me congratulate my brother on his first thread (that I know of) of the millenium at the SDMB (and only his second overall, so far. Come on tom, get off your ass!! )
And you don’t think that getting that role in the soap isn’t a defining moment for the actor? Sure, the repetitve plot lines are stupid in the soaps, but alot of the games in football are dull and repetitve as well (how many years were tampa bay {or my town’s team, the seahawks} the laugh of the league?) How many of the Super Bowls in the 80’s and early 90’s were the same old thing, year after year? NFC blows out AFC, again and again and again
Many of these young actors on soaps don’t get paid a fifth (probably more like a tenth) of what young pro athletes do… and they have worked just as hard at their chosen careers, if not harder, in many cases. Many years of classes, degrading cattle call auditions… it’s not exactly a picnic.
Maybe so, but that’s not the point. The point is that thousands of people were showing up to watch pro sports contests in all of the sports I mentioned long before these games were ever televised. Television helped them become more popular, yes, but they were already popular enough without it to survive. Soap operas, on the other hand, have no existence without television. I’ll get more into this below:
You’re missing the point of what I’m saying. I’m not denying that what you say is true, but you are comparing apples and oranges. Sure, getting a role on a soap may be a big deal to an actor, but that is not what the show is about. That actor is portraying a character, not a real person, in an artificial setting. Sure, some football games are boring, but they are never “planned” that way. Both teams go into the contest hoping to win, even though only one of them can. The game’s outcome is determined honestly, on the field. (This is why the NFL discourages gambling-so there is no temptation to monkey with the fair outcome of games). But a soap opera has no connection to reality. The people in it are not living “real” lives, or portraying “real” events. It’s all fake. But in a football game nobody, including the players, knows the outcome before anyone watching does. The players are not portraying characters, they are being themselves.
“Beer Opera”… not bad! I’ll even think about switching to that from “Warball” (my old name for the game). I mean “football” for the sport just doesn’t make any sense.
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